Wildflower

Fifteen years between Since I Left You (2000) and Wildflower (2016). Part of the reason is straightforward: the impossibility of clearing samples in the post-Bush of Ghosts legal environment that Paul’s Boutique had helped trigger. The Avalanches spent years in negotiations over samples, rebuilt sections when clearances failed, and eventually released a record that contains over 3,500 sample sources — which is either an extraordinary act of archival patience or an argument that the sample-clearance system is not designed to accommodate the kind of music they were making.

Wildflower is the record where the Avalanches expanded the Since I Left You collage method into something more explicitly song-structured — more singers, more melodic hooks, more moments that resolve rather than accumulate. Whether that is a concession to listenability or a genuine aesthetic evolution is a question the record leaves open. The accumulation is still the point; it just has more company now.